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Student landlord Unite (UTG) has completed its £723mn acquisition of smaller peer Empiric (ESP), in line with previous guidance for the deal to conclude by the end of January.

The company has also reiterated that Empiric’s performance for the 2025/26 academic year has been below Unite’s own expectations, as the student accommodation market grapples with softening occupancy rates and pricing.

Shares in Unite rose 1 per cent in early trading.

Debenhams Group (DEBS), formerly known as Boohoo Group, has cheered the market with an upgrade to earnings guidance, pushing its shares 5 per cent higher in early trading.

The online retailer, which owns brands including Boohoo and Karen Miller, said it now expects FY26 adjusted earnings to come in ahead of market expectations, at over £50mn.

The upgrade was driven by an improved performance in its ‘youth brands’. Debenhams is shifting towards a marketplace model, and part of the strategy had involved putting one of its struggling youth brands, PrettyLittleThing (PLT), up for sale.

But the company has said it now intends to hold onto the “promising” brand in light of its turnaround. The company said PLT had recorded a “material improvement in profitability” over the past year.

“Whether this genuinely is a result of an improved performance for this brand or just because of the lack of a willing buyer is open to question,” said Dan Coatsworth, head of markets at AJ Bell.

However, analysts at Investec said that it is “pleasing” to see the ongoing improvement in profits, and noted the group’s “sensible” efforts to explore ways to improve the balance sheet. The next market update is due in March.

Investors on the hunt for copper have pushed up Ecora Royalties’ (ECOR) by 143 per cent in the past year. It was last trading this strongly in 2022, when record coal prices sent earnings soaring.

The 2025 income statement remains a long way off the peak of a few years ago, but the revaluation of the base metals portfolio has the company now thinking about further growth.

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Auction Technology Group (ATG) and major shareholder FitzWalter have been at odds for weeks over the investment group’s buyout bids.

It came out in early January that ATG had rejected 11 bids from FitzWalter, which took the process public in order to pressure the company’s board. Its latest offer of 400p, valuing ATG at £484mn, came last week. 

Now, FitzWalter has made that offer final because it “has not been granted access to due diligence and confirms that, as a result, the financial terms of the possible offer will not be improved or increased and are final”.

That did come with an asterisk. Quite an important asterisk: “[The financial terms are final unless] the board of ATG announces that it recommends or is minded to recommend an offer on better terms than the possible offer.”

ATG has previously said FitzWalter has not been serious in advancing these offers. 

“At the time of this announcement [19 January], no customary letter setting out the full terms and conditions of the indicative offer has been received by the board. Macquarie Capital, FitzWalter’s financial adviser, confirmed such a letter would not be provided and that the board should make its own assumptions as to the other terms and conditions of the indicative offer,” ATG said. 

The auction company’s shares are trading at 300p, showing there is little confidence of a deal in the market.

British Land (BLND) has announced the acquisition of smaller peer Life Science Reit (LABS) for £150mn. 

The offer, which has been unanimously accepted by Life Science’s board, values its shares at 42.8p, a 21 per cent premium to yesterday’s close price, but at a 26 per cent discount to the

December 2025 net asset value per share. One third is in cash and the remainder in British Land shares. 

Life Science shareholders will own 2.4 per cent of British Land following completion of the deal, expected in April.

The company, which owns five life science assets last valued at £333mn, had previously announced in September that it would enter into a managed wind-down*. Activist shareholders including Saba Capital and Achilles Investment Company (A������ý) are among several shareholders who have publicly backed the deal.

They have a combined shareholding of 31 per cent.

“The deal returns immediate value to shareholders without the costs, uncertainty and execution risks of a managed wind-down,” Robert Naylor, lead fund manager of Achilles and a board member at Life Science, told Investors’ Chronicle.

British Land is guiding for the acquisition to be immediately earnings accretive, once it pares back Life Science’s £5mn of annual admin fees and refinances its debt. These include a £3mn fee paid to its external fund manager, Ironstone Asset Management, which will be discontinued.

British Land estimates that it can increase the annual rental income from the Life Science portfolio by nearly 40 per cent to £25mn by filling vacancies and realising open-market rents. It can lease to a broader range of tenants than Life Science, whose mandate restricts it to tenants in the life science sector.

“The acquisition underlines our confidence in the long-term occupational fundamentals of the science and technology sector, and our ability to deliver attractive returns,” said Simon Carter, the outgoing chief executive of British Land.

Shares in Life Science rose 19 per cent in early trading, while those in British Land fell 1 per cent.

*This sentence has been corrected after previously saying Achilles and Saba had successfully campaigned for a wind-down. Both bought in months after the strategic review had started.

Marstons (MARS) said revenue over the 17 weeks to 17 January had held up well and outpaced the wider market, thanks to a busy Christmas period when like-for-like sales grew by 4 per cent.

The group, which was recently targeted by an activist investor demanding more buybacks, said it remained confident of driving margin improvement to hit consensus forecasts (of an underlying pre-tax profit of £78.7mn), but the shares fell by 10 per cent to 62p. They are still up by two-thirds since they were highlighted in our ideas section in late 2024.

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Pre-tax profit at Hargreaves Services (HSP) more than doubled to £14.3mn on a 46 per cent jump in revenue to £183.1mn. Growth was driven by a big increase in revenue at its services division, which is carrying out land remediation work at major projects like Sizewell C but profits were also boosted by land sales.

The company also announced that Gordon Banham, who has run the company for more than 20 years, is to retire in July. He will be replaced by chief operating officer, Simon Hicks.

The shares rose by 5 per cent.

Copper prices are at record levels and Atalaya Mining’s (ATYM) shares have more than matched this performance, tripling in the past 12 months. The company has used this valuation strength to raise £130mn from the market, largely to support expansion through a new mine build and extensions at the existing Riotinto project in Spain.

The raise was done at 1,000p, compared with the pre-raise price of 1,056p. The new mine, Touro, has not yet received a permit. A 2018 study put annual production at 30,000 tonnes after a development bill of $165mn (£120mn), although mine costs have risen significantly since then. Atalaya said on Wednesday the capital raise would provide the “financial flexibility to optimise the ultimate funding package for Proyecto Touro”.

RBC Capital Markets analyst Laura Chan said the raise was “fairly opportunistic” and took Atalaya’s total available cash to around $324mn. “We find the timing of the raise somewhat odd given the company has yet to receive the key permit for Touro,” she added.